As the government regained control, Nicholas expected Russia to return to how it had been before. He utterly misunderstood what had happened. The revolution had let loose a hunger for democracy and representation that couldn’t be denied. But there was no way for the tsar to see the political yearning and excitement of his newly enfranchised subjects. He had so thoroughly cocooned himself at Tsarskoe Selo that he now had even less idea of what was going on than he had had before the revolution. The household and entourage—the most conservative enclave in the land—were entirely unable to represent to him the extraordinarily widespread hostility to the regime which had built up across every class and region. And his isolation only intensified his tendency to reject anyone who delivered news he didn’t want to hear, or tried to pressure him to do things he didn’t want to do. He told his mother that he and Alix were “virtual prisoners”20 there, but as Cecil Spring-Rice, chargé d’affaires at the British embassy, and one of the most perceptive of British observers, wrote in April 1906, “The Emperor is21 perfectly happy at Tsarskoe, where he leads the life which suits him best, playing with his children and only seeing the people he wishes to see.” As the new British ambassador noted in early 1907, “Personal contact with22 the Court is exceedingly rare, far more infrequent probably than in any other country.” After a year and a half in the job, he had met the tsar only three times. While the newly liberated Russian press was full of stories of naval mutinies, running battles between police and mobs, mass executions and huge demonstrations, the tsar’s diary dwelt on the weather, his walks, troop inspections and dinner with the family.
In the weeks after the October manifesto, when the risings failed to stop, the lesson Nicholas drew was that it had made no difference; he suspected the autocracy had never really been under threat and he should never have signed it away. He began to resent Sergei Witte for having forced the constitution upon him. The old jealousy of his own powers and prerogatives reasserted itself. It wasn’t hard to criticize Witte: he was difficult, abrupt, made enemies easily and was by no means always successful. “I have never seen such23 a chameleon of a man,” Nicholas wrote in January 1906. “That naturally, is the reason why no one believes in him any more. He is absolutely discredited with everybody, except perhaps the Jews abroad.” When Witte returned to Russia in triumph after Algeciras in April 1906, having negotiated a vast French loan—the largest in Russian history—to keep the government afloat, Nicholas sacked him. Lamsdorff resigned days later, exhausted and dreading the new constitution. He would die the following year.
Alix missed little about the world outside too. She constructed the walls of the family’s cocoon, spending her days in her mauve parlour, its walls crammed with icons and family photographs, surrounded by her children and those few people whom she regarded as allies. Alexis’s birth had aged her, and her health seemed ever more fragile. She was permanently exhausted, complained of shortness of breath, and her lips went blue with alarming speed, but no one could diagnose what was wrong. The imperial family’s doctor, Botkin, seems to have regarded the symptoms as psychosomatic—he called them “progressive hysteria.”24 The empress’s participation in public life declined to almost nothing, and when she did appear, it was always obvious that she was in extreme discomfort, both physical and mental. By 1906 the formal connections with St. Petersburg and society had dwindled and dwindled. The winter season with its imperial balls and levees had been cancelled in 1904 because of the war, and the royal couple saw no reason to reinstate it. Nicholas’s sister Olga worried about the ill feeling their withdrawal was producing in the capital. But Nicky and Alix seemed equally determined to push the family away too. Minny complained that Alix made less and less effort to see her, and Nicholas barely listened to her anymore. Nicholas’s sister Xenia, who considered herself a loyal supporter of Alix, was extraordinarily upset when the empress implied that she and Sandro had fled the country during the revolution—they’d been in France. “Only those who were there, really know what it was,” the empress said pointedly. “I was silent and my head started to ache,”25 Xenia wrote. When Misha, Nicholas’s brother, fell in love with a commoner, the tsar had the girl arrested as she attempted to leave the country, so as to prevent them getting married. And he exiled two of his first cousins for making what he regarded as unsuitable marriages.
The family was alienated by Alix’s predilection for taking up with faith healers and self-proclaimed miracle workers. St. Petersburg society, like many of Europe’s fashionable centres, was in the grip of a fad for charismatics, mysticism and the occult. Increasingly and passionately immersed in the mysticism of the Russian Church, Alix was all too susceptible. In 1900, desperate for a son, she had been introduced to a self-proclaimed faith healer called M. Philippe, who promised her an heir. For a while, much to Minny’s disapproval, he had been constantly in attendance, until Alix failed to produce a son in 1902, and then he had fallen from grace. “It is more26 Alicky who is under this horrid man’s influence than Nicky,” May had reported to George. “Aunt Minny is in despair.” More worryingly he was replaced in 1905 with Grigori Rasputin.
Rasputin was a self-styled “starets” (a holy man and faith healer), a peasant from Siberia, who had made a splash in St. Petersburg. Famous for his allegedly hypnotic pale blue eyes, he claimed to be a reformed sinner—the name “Rasputin” means “debauched”—who had been touched by God and could effect miracles. The key to Rasputin’s intimate relationship with the imperial family was that he seemed to alleviate Alexis’s haemophilia. It is likely that through some kind of light hypnosis he calmed and reassured the tsarevitch. Whatever he did, on several occasions his proximity to Alexis seemed to bring about miraculous recoveries—the agonizing swellings subsided, the internal bleeding stopped. He further won the imperial couple’s trust by presenting himself as their idea of a simple, effusive, pious, salt-of-the-earth peasant. Nicholas said that Rasputin made him feel at peace. Alix called him “Our Friend” and decided he had been sent by God to help them. Both, however, refused to explain to anyone outside a very small circle why Rasputin was important to them—doing so would have revealed the truth about Alexis’s haemophilia.
Away from the imperial family Rasputin was a different person: manipulative, coarse, bullying, surrounded by a motley assortment of clients and hangers-on. Descriptions of encounters with him conjure up an aggressively insinuating man, snowing his victims under with a barrage of over-intimate questions. His standing with the imperial couple meant that everyone felt obliged to listen. But for the moment his reputation was limited to the royal family and its retainers.
When Nicholas and his court first encountered the members of Russia’s first elected assembly, the Duma, on 27 April by the Russian calendar, in the St. George Room at the Winter Palace, they saw it as a terrible defeat, an opposition that must be countered. To Nicholas its members represented his own abject failure to defend 300 years of the sacred tradition. The head of the imperial household, Count Fredericks, said, “They gave one27 the impression of a gang of criminals who are only waiting for the signal to throw themselves upon the Ministers and cut their throats. What wicked faces! I will never again set foot among those people.” Xenia wrote of their “repulsive faces28 and insolent expressions.” In truth, though there were some angry radicals, plenty of the new elected members were part of the traditional establishment with no desire to bring down the monarchy. Vladimir Nabokov’s father, for example, was a landowner whose family had been in service to the tsars for centuries.* He had come to believe the government had cynically abdicated its responsibilities. What shocked the royal contingent most was the Duma’s lack of forelock-tugging deference. “They looked at us,”30 Nicholas’s mother said, “as upon their enemies, and I could not make myself stop looking at certain faces, so much did they seem to reflect an incomprehensible hatred for all of us.” Several months later Xenia’s husband, Sandro, had the same uncomprehending reaction when he was briefly taken hostage by “his own” sailors dur
ing a mutiny. He’d thought they loved him. “I felt so31 proud of being considered their friend and confidant. A hostage! I feared I was going to collapse!”
This puncturing of expectations of deference, loyalty and love from the lower classes was by no means limited to Russia. Democracy had taken a big step all over Europe, and aristocratic elites were reluctantly realizing both the loss of their authority and that they had not been regarded with unqualified admiration by the lower orders. There was the same mystified surprise (not to say irritating naïveté) in the reaction of George Wyndham, chief secretary for Ireland in the British Conservative government of 1902–6 and member of the intellectual aristocratic and political coterie called “the Souls,” when he lost his seat in the Conservative wipe-out in the election of January 1906. He’d thought he’d won before “because the working32 men love me, simply because we liked each other and love the traditions of the past and the glory of the future.”
In Britain the 1906 general election delivered a death blow to such assumptions. Wyndham’s fellow Soul Arthur Balfour described the election, somewhat melodramatically though not without truth, as part of the same convulsion that had brought about “the massacres in33 St. Petersburg, riots in Vienna and socialist processions in Berlin.” After twelve years in government the Conservatives were an exhausted force. It was surprising perhaps that a party so predicated on privilege had lasted so long, though as governments have learned since, you can get voters to vote against their own economic interests if you can find something sufficiently powerful to counter them with—religion, a powerful hate, a collective (even if unrealistic) aspiration. The Tories had remained in power with a little judicious aristocratic paternalism, because the country had become richer and because they had kept it excited about the empire. Now, however, they had alienated the electorate with a bad war, a series of colonial scandals and anti-labour laws, and had little to offer but the unthinking support of privilege for its own sake. The Liberals won a landslide victory and the aristocratic oligarchy lost control of the British government.
The new Liberal government still had its aristocrats—Sir Edward Grey, Winston Churchill and the new prime minister, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, who took his holidays in Marienbad with the king—but after twelve years in the wilderness it was a different animal from the aristocratic party of the early 1890s. Its new MPs came predominantly from the professional middle class, and its acknowledged rising stars were the solidly middle-class Herbert Asquith and the dazzlingly charismatic, witty, brilliant and occasionally unscrupulous David Lloyd George, who had grown up in poverty in Wales. Moreover, it had radical plans to transform the lives of working people with health insurance and pensions. With it came twenty-nine new MPs from the Independent Labour Party. “The old idea34 that the House of Commons was an assemblage of gentlemen has quite passed away,” Lord Esher wrote mournfully. When Asquith became prime minister in 1908, he took it as given that all ministers of senior government departments should sit in the Commons, not the Lords, because the cabinet was responsible to the electorate, not the aristocracy.* Under the previous administration, many of the cabinet had never stood for election at all.
The Conservative political aristocracy, like its German and Russian counterparts, was not ready to admit its day was past. “The great Unionist35 party,”† Arthur Balfour announced after the defeat, “should still control whether in power or opposition the destinies of this Great Empire.” In the House of Lords, where they had a majority, the Conservatives deliberately began blocking Liberal legislation. It wasn’t long before Lloyd George, who with Herbert Asquith was shaping the new plans for health insurance and pensions which would lay the foundations of the Welfare State, was asking “whether the country was36 to be governed by the King and His Peers or by the King and his people.” An unabashed class warrior, Lloyd George didn’t mince his words: “All down history37 nine tenths of mankind have been grinding corn for the remaining tenth and have been paid with husks and bidden to thank god they had the husks.” Edward, who in his younger days liked to claim that the French statesman Léon Gambetta had almost converted him to republicanism, hated Lloyd George’s rhetoric, which he considered dangerously divisive. Knollys, the king’s private secretary, was soon complaining about Lloyd George’s breaches of “good taste and propriety,”38 and demanding that he keep the monarch’s name out of his “violent tirades.”
Outwardly, Edward’s relationship with the new government was in some respects better than the one he had had with the Conservatives. There were areas of agreement—reforms of the army and the navy, the aims of foreign policy—and Knollys, a long-time Liberal supporter, had good contacts in the party. But Edward deplored their frequent crimes against fashion, their newfangled ideas about woman suffrage, the new culture of outspokenness and their plebeian habits. Winston Churchill, Edward confided quietly to his son, was “almost more39 of a cad in office than he was in opposition.” Herbert Asquith was “deplorably common40 not to say vulgar!” George, who had a growing reputation for tactlessness, told Churchill that Asquith was “not quite41 a gentleman”—a comment Churchill thoughtfully passed on. Asquith regarded the king’s demands to be consulted over cabinet decisions with barely suppressed condescension. “These people42 have no right to interfere in any way with our deliberations,” he said—though he claimed to consider the king shrewd.
From Burma, where he was shooting tigers, George, a traditional Tory, wrote after the 1906 election, “I see a great number of Labour members have been returned, which is rather a dangerous sign, but I hope they are not all Socialists.” He soon conceived a genuine loathing for Lloyd George, which he freely expressed. After witnessing one of the prince’s tirades against the Welshman, the writer Edmund Gosse described him as “an overgrown43 schoolboy, loud and stupid, losing no opportunity of abusing the government.” On becoming king, George told Lloyd George’s own permanent secretary that he couldn’t imagine “how you can44 go on serving that damned fellow Lloyd George.”
The difference between Britain and Russia was that political institutions obliged George to meet Lloyd George and be courteous. In Russia, Nicholas, now equipped with a large French loan, could refuse to work with the Duma, and veto its decisions. He dismissed its requests for amnesties and for land reallocation, ignored its reform programme and dissolved it, in July 1906. He imprisoned those members who protested and changed the suffrage qualifications, so subsequent Dumas would be more conservative and deferential. But, however conservative they became, the Dumas would not stop insisting they had a stake in governing the country. Nicholas went on resenting them and dissolving them. “One must let45 them do something manifestly stupid or mean,” he told his mother, “and then—slap! and they are gone!”
For Russia, the disastrous consequences of its attempt to prove its manifest destiny in the East were not just a barely contained revolution, but also the humiliating necessity of going cap-in-hand to Britain, and agreeing to an Anglo-Russian Convention, a move which reversed fifty years of foreign policy and imperial dreams. The British government had been proposing an Entente since the end of the Japanese War in 1905. The Russians had mimed agreement, but the pill was almost too bitter to swallow. There was still tremendous anger over Britain’s role in the war. The Russian army in particular hated the idea of any reconciliation with Britain or any curtailment of territorial expansion in Asia. The Russian court still tended instinctively to Germany. The agreement finally came about because the Russians needed it, the French—who held their purse-strings—wanted it, and the new Russian foreign minister, Count Alexander Izvolsky, the diplomat who had caught Edward’s eye in Copenhagen, and who replaced Lamsdorff in 1906, pushed for it. He argued that Russia was so vulnerable that all reasons for external conflict must be eliminated. There would be no more Asian adventures for the foreseeable future, so it was vital that Russia’s influence and position in Asia be secured against future incursions, including British ones.
Even so, the secret n
egotiations were tortuous, and several times the sheer weight of ideological difference seemed on the point of derailing the talks. In July 1906 a delegation of Duma members travelled to London for the interparliamentary conference, and were welcomed with a special message from King Edward. On the eve of the conference, however, the news came that Nicholas had dissolved the Duma. The prime minister, Henry Campbell-Bannerman, was due to make the opening speech at the conference. He said, not unreasonably, that he couldn’t address a conference on parliamentary democracy and ignore the tsar’s action. At the end of his speech he said, “La Douma est morte! Vive la Douma!”46 The Duma is dead! Long live the Duma! The words drew a chorus of conference cheers and a formal complaint from the Russian ambassador, Count Benckendorff. Grey refused to apologize and the negotiations stalled. Then in September 1906 some backbench Liberals decided to visit Russia in support of the dissolved Duma. Nicholas was deeply offended. “A grotesque deputation47 is coming from England … Uncle Bertie informed us that they were very sorry, but were unable to take action to stop their coming. Their famous ‘liberty’ of course! How angry they would be if a deputation went from us to the Irish to wish them success in their struggle against their government!” Grey managed to dissuade the group from going. Izvolsky sent his thanks and said it had saved much embarrassment as the visitors would certainly have been prevented from48 travelling. Then, only two months before the Convention was signed, the British ambassador was summoned to London amid rumours that the Russians were calling the whole thing to a halt.
The Three Emperors Page 40
